Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Here we go again!

As Owen Wilson's character said in Armageddon: "I'm 98% excited and 2% scared! Maybe it's more! It could be 98% scared and 2% excited!"

Only 3 days before I put on my shoes and attempt my first 50 miler. The last week is difficult. My training plan calls for basically no running. Today I ran 2.5 miles. What am I supposed to do with that? Most of it slow, too except for 4 short strides. Maaaaan! I have one last run on Friday, similar to this one. It might be even shorter.

I. AM. GOING. NUTS. Thank God work is busy as hell, so at least I can concentrate on that.

I went to the Mountain Equipment Coop this after noon (kinda like a Canadian REIT). Grocery shopping. I bought a whole bunch of gels, Cliff Bars, Jelly Belly beans, bug spray (I f@cking HATE mosquitoes), sunscreen and two extra pairs of Injinji toe socks. Cost me a fortune. I walked by the trail running shoes. Fondled a pair of La Sportiva Wildcats. My Crosslites are getting up there and I will need new trail shoes soon. Anyway I didn't try anything because I cannot be trusted right now.

I made a spreadsheet that calculates finishing times accordint to run/walk paces for a 13 minutes run/2 minutes walk ratio. That's stupid because in a trail, I find it very difficult to control my pace. In training, I use my GPS to control my pace. In a race, I like to use it at the very beginning to confirm that, yes, I'm running WAY too fast! Once that initial rush is over, the GPS becomes a witness and I rarely look at it. It will probably run out of batteries anyway, battery life being around 10 hours. I doubt that I'll run faster than that.

Goal wise, I'm slowly refining them. I think that my C goal will be less than 12 hours. Barring any injury, I feel comfortable with that. I would be really happy with less than 11 hours: that will be my B goal. My A goal would be anything close to 10 hours. That would be amazing.

That being said, what little ultra experience I have tells me that anything can happen. In my first ultra, I screwed up badly by starting way too fast and not slowing down until it was basically too late. I probably didn't eat and drink quite enough either. In my second 50km race, the course was harder but I had a more controlled race. At the end though, I had some difficulty eating. I just didn't feel like it. I will have to keep eating on Saturday, or else.

So that's it. I thought I would relieve some "arousal" (as they say in the books) by blogging a bit. I've warned people not to talk to me about running because they don't want to get me going. When it happens, it's not pretty. Most people obviously believe I'm deranged. They try to help me by explaining how it's not "natural" to run such long distances. What the fuck are they talking about? Of course it's "natural". Man, I got MYSELF all worked up!

Ok, time to watch some TV and try to numb my brain by looking for ONE good program in a 500 channels universe. But that's probably too much to ask.